Bush Administration seeks Google porn search data

The police state is on the march.

The Bush administration, seeking to revive an online pornography law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, has subpoenaed Google Inc. for details on what its users have been looking for through its popular search engine.

Google has refused to comply with the subpoena, issued last year, for a broad range of material from its databases, including a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period, lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department said in papers filed Wednesday in federal court in San Jose.

Privacy advocates have been increasingly scrutinizing Google's practices as the company expands its offerings to include e-mail, driving directions, photo-sharing, instant messaging and Web journals.

Although Google pledges to protect personal information, the company's privacy policy says it complies with legal and government requests. Google also has no stated guidelines on how long it keeps data, leading critics to warn that retention is potentially forever given cheap storage costs.

The government says it needs these data so it can assess how frequently pornography shows up in online searches. Why? So the administration can try to revive an anti-kiddie porn law that the Supreme Court struck down two years ago on First Amendment grounds.

Of course, that doesn't explain why they would need access to all searches that involve pornographic key words. And, how do you define such a thing in the first place? How useful would such data be in reviving a law struck down by the highest court in the land? The word of the Supreme Court, last time I checked, is final. To whom does the administration plan to appeal?

And, "1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period?" If what they really want is an idea of how often people are searching for porn, they would be better off just picking some key words and/or phrases, typing them into Google, and checking the results.

Considering this president's tendency to grab power and not answer questions later, I hope he will forgive the skeptics among us for doubting his motives.